When people say that the best album of all time is Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, they tend not to mean that the best album of all time actually is ‘Thriller’. ‘Thriller’ is nominated as the best album of all time, again and again, because it is an album which people can agree is the best album of all time, even if they individually feel that another album really deserves the title. “I personally think that ‘Nevermind’ is the best album of all time,” the logic might go, “but ‘Thriller’ is clearly an amazing album, and I really don’t think I could argue that it isn’t the best album of all time.”

It might be a cliche that ‘Thriller’ is the best album ever, but in all seriousness what else are you going to choose?

Well, the worst album of all time has been less easy to identify but from this week onwards, decades into the future, Eoghan Quigg‘s album ‘Eoghan Quigg’ will be the one that scoops the accolade. It will take on a sense of legendary badness. Its badness will become a cliche, trotted out on terrible ‘talking heads’ TV shows. But, as with ‘Thriller’, what else will it be possible for people to choose? ‘Eoghan Quigg’ is sort of the anti-‘Thriller’ – a record which manages to be as bad as Michael Jackson’s opus is good.

Those of you who have not yet heard ‘Eoghan Quigg’ might rightly be thinking that this album was always going to be bad, and that it’s unfair to single out this sort of album – quickly recorded in the wake of X Factor success – as being worse than any of the other X Factor, Pop Idol or Fame Academy albums.

Well you’re right that this was always going to be a bad album, but only in Simon
Cowell’s wildest nightmares was ‘Eoghan Quigg’ ever going to be quite as bad as the
reality unleashed on record stores this week. It’s a badness that sometimes feels
as if it could tear a hole in the fabric of time
and space. What we will say is this: listen to the album. Then, and only then, will you be able to really understand how intergalactically bad ‘Eoghan Quigg’ really is. Imagine the three worst reality pop albums you have ever heard. Let’s pick the Michelle McManus album, the David Sneddon album and the Journey South album. Imagine the combined badness of all those albums, then somehow imagine that ALL personality has been sucked out out. Then imagine that they kept on sucking, long after there all personality was gone, until there was a sort of personality prolapse. You are still only half way to understanding just how empty these recordings are.

To clarify, it is not shit in the same way that some people (not us) might say that Same
Difference or Shayne Ward recordings are shit. It is the sort of shit that even
the most deliberately obtuse, most tragically deluded and self-defensive
pro-pop evangelist would have to call shit. And it sounds cheap. So very, very cheap. ‘Eoghan Quigg’ – an album so inescapably awful that when coming to the title only the words ‘eoghan’ and ‘quigg’ were capable of summarising its shoddiness – sounds like it will have recouped all recording costs after selling four copies. It is an album entirely without merit, recorded so cheaply and with
such little regard for the art of pop that the final product simply
does not count as music, and should not be included in the album chart. It is just as well that this album was not out in time for Mother’s Day, because it would only have been a suitable Mother’s Day present if your mother was Hitler.